Sidney Finkel spent most of July 2, the day Elie Wiesel died, in transit between his part-time homes in Matteson and Tucson.

Hearing the news after arriving in Arizona, Finkel was hardly shocked — he is, after all, 84 years old, and Wiesel was 87. But when they were both very young, they were imprisoned at the same time at Buchenwald, one of Nazi Germany's largest concentration camps.

"My reaction was one of sadness," Finkel said, the emotion evident in the recollection. "Before he started, (the Holocaust) was not a topic that you talked about. He's the one who made people sit up and listen."

Wiesel's book "Night," recounting his experiences as a Romanian Jew in Auschwitz and Buchenwald, was published in English in 1960. In 1986, he would be awarded a Nobel Peace Prize.

"'Night' is a very powerful book," Finkel said, pausing for a beat. "It's almost as good as mine."

Spoken like a man who supported his family as an appliance salesman while living for half a century in the south suburbs — first in Glenwood, then Matteson.

Wiesel, a keynote speaker at the grand opening of the museum in Skokie in 2009, died July 2.

The program is...

And yes, Finkel did write, compellingly, about his childhood as a Polish Jew during the rise and fall of the Nazis. "Sevek: The Boy Who Refused to Die" (holocaustspeaker.com) documents the horrors he experienced starting at age 6 in 1939, when his family was forced to move into a ghetto in Piotrkow, Poland, and traces his path through two labor camps in Poland, then Buchenwald and a camp in Czechoslovakia.

Though Finkel and Wiesel were both at Buchenwald for a few months in early 1945, Finkel was marched out with hundreds of other prisoners on April 10, the day before the camp, with Wiesel still in it, was liberated by American soldiers.

"I did meet him once," Finkel said of Wiesel. "He was speaking at a synagogue in Homewood 30 years ago."

That was before Finkel decided to tell his own story, prompted by a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993. After getting started by speaking to students at Chicago-area schools, Finkel self-published "Sevek" in 2005.

He mailed a manuscript to Wiesel, who provided this cover blurb:

"It will move all those who want to know why, in those dark times of evil, so much suffering was inflicted on children your age. You know how deeply I feel about memory. Many readers will thank you for yours."

"That was one of his main themes in life," Finkel said. "You have to remember. You have to tell the story."

The Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany estimates there will be only 67,100 Holocaust survivors — Jews born before mid-1945 who lived in a country under Nazi regime, or a regime of Nazi collaborators — in the United States by 2020. By 2030, the number will be fewer than 16,000.

And even those numbers don't tell the whole story.

Of the perhaps 100,000 survivors in America today, Finkel said, "Many of them are Russian Jews. There are very few who were in concentration camps. Probably no more than 20,000."

So Finkel continues to tell his story — with some adjustments. A few years ago, he made a DVD as a companion to the book and an aidfor his lectures.

"I show the video and answer questions after," he said. "It spares me a lot of energy."

Yet, energy conservation and an active lifestyle — Finkel was an avid bicyclist who has turned to swimming — will stave off Father Time only so long. That's why Finkel has worked to include family members when he speaks.

"My children and grandchildren are very interested," he said. "I'm sure they'll tell the story when I'm gone.

"I have no doubt it will go on. Perhaps it won't have the same power as having a survivor tell it, but it won't be forgotten."

Those words echoed sentiments expressed by Wiesel in a 2012 interview with the Chicago Tribune.

"To listen to a witness is to become one," he said. "So there are many now who listen to us, and who read our books and are familiar with our statements.

"Therefore, I am not worried."

Finkel isn't, either. For all the atrocities he has seen, he has seen much good result from their retelling.

"Students always react to the destruction of my family — to my sister, giving birth to a child outside the ghetto, then to have soldiers throw the child out a window, and my sister shot," Finkel said. "Students hear that and they tell me, 'I'm going to go home and hug my family. I'm going to be grateful for what I have.'"